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Bicycle Messengers' Answer for Identity Crisis

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Bicycle Messengers' Answer for Identity Crisis ON THE BICYCLE TOWARDS FREEDOM: Bicycle Messengers’ answer for identity crisis Elżbieta Drążkiewicz Master Thesis in Social Anthropology at Lund University supervisor Steven Sampson December 2003 1. PREFACE...............................................................................................................................2 2. THEORTICAL FRAMEWORK ...........................................................................................4 3. STUDY METHODS...............................................................................................................7 4. WORK MOTIVATION and SOME OF THE COURIERS IDEOLOGY..............................9 5. WORK REALITY ................................................................................................................11 5.1. Copenhagen Messenger Companies ..................................................................................11 5.2. Working Day......................................................................................................................12 5.3. Warsaw Couriering Companies .........................................................................................13 5.4. Background and a Local Context.......................................................................................15 6. LIFE AFTER WORK: STILL BEING A BIKE MESSENGER..........................................17 6.1. Championships...................................................................................................................17 6.2. Local Races........................................................................................................................24 6.3. Spare and leisure time........................................................................................................29 7. STYLE ..................................................................................................................................33 7.1. Clothes and Accessories ....................................................................................................33 7.2. Bicycle ...............................................................................................................................37 8. SELF IMAGE AND SELF PRESENTATION ....................................................................42 8.1. Symbols, Slogans, Pictures................................................................................................42 8.2. Stories ................................................................................................................................43 9. IDENTITY............................................................................................................................51 10. CONCLUSIONS.................................................................................................................53 11. APPENDIX.........................................................................................................................55 12. BIBLIOGRAPHY ..............................................................................................................64 1 1. PREFACE You know the bike messenger if you’ve lived in the urban core or worked in any big city office: the wrap-around sun-glasses, the proud outlaw swagger, chain around the hips, two-way Motorola Iden strapped crackling to big messenger bag, the guy who thinks he’s the toughest, looniest cat around because he gets paid the fat bills to ride a bike fast through hell’s nine circles delivering the important packages for the important clients. You know these images, of the rebel and madman, the glamorous transgressor, the free man who laughs at slow humanity huddled under umbrellas at bus-stops. The bike messenger as urban legend, Hermes’ minion, the winged one. (C. Ketcham 2000) Do You know a bike messenger? Well even if not, the aim of this paper is to introduce you this group of young people working on the streets around the world, so don’t worry. If you do know any of them, or maybe even you are one of them, then I hope this essay will provide you with some more information and help you to place the couriers’ issues in the wider social context. My first encounters with bike messengers were on the streets of Warsaw a few years ago. When I was cycling around town every day to school, there were not many other bikers passing me by. Warsaw is simply not a place where you use a bike as a means of transport. Among those few bikers that I came across while riding, the most recognizable were couriers. Fast, in different clothes, very sure of themselves. They were very novel on Warsaw streets, not only because Warsaw doesn’t have many street bikers, but also because there had been no bike messengers on Warsaw streets before. This occupation was new and fresh, and therefore a mystery, who were those guys? A few years later, thanks to sharing the same passion for biking I actually met a few of those guys who had been couriers in the past. We became close friends, although for them work as messenger was only a part of their past life as they were involved in new careers now, I still heard many of their messenger days stories. A little time after that period, my brother met couriers who were currently involved in a messengering. He started to participate in their races and soon persuaded me to check my biking skills in competition with those professionals. It became a good entertainment and sport for me. But although I love riding my bike in the city, and probably in few characteristics I am very like those guys, I never decided to take up that job (but who knows the future?). But my brother did. After 5 years of studying at Warsaw University, working in the NGO sector, and becoming valued expert in his working field, his passion for cycling prevailed. To our mother’s disappointment and surprise he became a bike messenger, and start his own couriering company. At that moment our dearest mother wasn’t the most enthusiastic person about her son’s life project. First of all that is because, like most of the members of our society, she didn’t consider being a bike courier as a real job. Being a bike messenger is not a job, a career, that a mother would dream of for her son or a daughter (especially not for a daughter). Like many other physical jobs it is considered to be only for those that couldn’t get a better job, are not educated and therefore consider to be life losers. This is not a job that would give you prestige, a high social status and position. This job is not the kind of job that one would like to call a career. A career 2 should be carried out in a suit and in an office. Never on the street. Being a bike messenger can only be accepted when treated as an extra job, for students (a serious, grown up person should never get that kind of job if he wants to retain any pride) who, while studying, are trying to get extra money. But choosing this job instead of good position in some nice office, or after graduating when one should became an adult, and get a real, grown up job…that is unthinkable. That is a step backwards, and our modern society allows and values only action forwards; always try to be better, to achieve something more. Becoming a bike messenger is definitely not a move of this kind. But there was also another thing bothering my mother, and probably many other couriers’ mothers. That was the risk awaiting at courier’s life on the streets. The risk of being hit by a car, or of having any other incident. A risk of getting poisoned with fumes. A risk of losing your health, when riding in winter. All those ideas of city streets as being extremely dangerous successfully prevent Warsaw’s and many other cities’ inhabitants from getting on bikes and traveling alongside cars. So why he has decided to change his safe office for dangerous streets? Why does he need to do it? My mother asks. I hope that this essay will help her find some answers. I hope it will also provide any other readers, maybe not even so personally, or at all involved or related to messengers, with answers to a question as to what is so tempting and special about bike messengers that it attracts people. How come it was possible that from a just another job, bike messengering evolved to part a life style? In this place I would like also express my gratitude for all of those that have contributed to my work and study. Especially to my Mother and Brother and to my Boyfriend Piotrek. Thank You for all your patience and support. Also great thanks deserves Maciek and Paul. And last but not least: thanks to all Bicycle Messengers, especially Warsaw and Copenhagen crews, thanks for your help in the research but first of all for a lot of fun! 3 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Some of the bicycle couriers date back the origins of their job to the beginnings of the XX century, when the bicycle was invented and first deliveries within a postal service was done on bicycles. That might be somehow correct, both past and present cases share the same goal and way of achieving it. However, I believe that today’s bicycle messengers, their job, and above all, everything that is built upon it, is a life style and some of the couriers characteristic have appeared not that long ago, but rather in a period of late modernity. I believe, that style that couriers poses is directly rooted in a late modernity era. What more, it is a form of reaction to the modernity. Reaction that is defensive and oppositional to the modernity, but as it will be shown in a paper, it also derive from it. What is it then
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